u/PsychologicalHall142

I don't know why I've avoided Julie Anne Long, but I have. Likely, I heard her name and misassociated it with another book or author—who knows. It's happened before (I did this with Laura Kinsale, even!). But I've recently noticed {What I Did for a Duke by Julie Anne Long} pop up so many times in this sub, I felt like it was worth including it in my 100-books-in-a-year challenge. I normally don't read books out of sequential order; and so it was because I truly believed this would be a one-off—just get it read to say I've read it kind of book—that I finally bit the bullet.

I was SO wrong.

Immediately I was struck by Long's prose—the pacing, the wit, the insight—and I thought, "Well, this was not what I expected." So pleasantly surprised, I was instantly sure that I my misgivings about her writing were all wrong. My OCD then began to twerk, and I almost considered closing it immediately to go back to the first in the Pennyroyal series... but I could not put it down.

I was so charmed by Genevieve, who managed to be both naive and wise all at once, and whose virginity never once made her predictable or insipid. And Alex! How rare it is to encounter jaded dukes who are neither rakes nor paragons of virtue. Both characters so deftly toed the lines between clichés that one could almost forget that they somehow also neatly fit into several of archetypes equally. Their story is so unique and their relationship journey so captivating. And conversations. Real, heartfelt, witty, in-depth conversations. Not just between MCs either. It was just so damn refreshing.

At about the 85% point, when I read >!that Alex folded his hand and let Harry win Rosemont so he could propose to Genevieve,!<I immediately began sobbing and didn't have a dry eye for the rest of the book. I have had so few five-star reads this year, this one took me completely by surprise. And while some books I will fence-sit between four and five stars for agonizing minutes before finally making a decision, I could not give this five stars fast enough.

I've tried to track back through my comments and utilize the search function to find who mentioned this book recently, but they have both failed me. So if any of you are reading this—thank you, thank you, thank you! I am now going back to the start of Pennyroyal and couldn't be more excited.

I recognize that there is a large portion of the general populace that sees "dark mode" as more comfortable, less eye straining, or just aesthetically more pleasing. But there are also a substantial number of people, particularly those with astigmatism, for whom "dark mode" is actually debilitating.

I switched recently from ChatGPT to Gemini for a number of reasons, and I've been generally happy. But this recent forced dark mode in all code snippets is making me reconsider. Is there really no way to change this? Because, no—changing settings to light mode in either the web-based version or the native desktop app does not affect it. And neither does a Stylus override.

I've sleuthed a little around here and know that I'm not the only one that it bothers. But what really gets me is that no one seems to take this as a matter of accessibility, not merely preference. I have astigmatism, and the stark white on black contrast not only creates visual disturbances that make it difficult to read the text that's in dark mode itself, but everything else I read for several minutes afterward. If I have to read something for long durations in dark mode, I completely lose the actual ability to read after a while, and it can even lead to migraines with visual auras that last for much, much longer.

Yes, I can copy/paste code to other programs to read it (which I have been doing), but I shouldn't have to do this in 2026. Google, you're supposed to be better than this. Fix it, please!

I'm experiencing an issue with overnight events that I can't seem to troubleshoot. Whenever an overnight event would normally trigger (meteorite, crop fairy, owl hooting, etc.) I hear a weird, fast "whooshing" sound—not the same sound effect you hear during the windstorm event, it actually sounds glitched—then the day ends (profits screen and save happen normally). When the farmer wakes the next morning, there is a "thud" sound just like you hear when you fall down a chute in the Skull Cavern. I do not get notifications about these events occurring, nor do I see evidence later (alien pod, owl statue, void egg, etc.). I'm in year four of this farm and not a single overnight has happened in the last couple of years. The last one I remember being successful was the one that introduces the raccoon in the Cindersap tree.

I've tried reinstalling the game, reinstalling SMAPI, and wiping/reinstalling all of my mods (in batches), but I can't seem to isolate what's causing it. I've also checked the SMAPI log each time it happens for errors, but nothing appears.

My parsed log is here: https://smapi.io/log/f6635730c7804be491a4f8bfe5595afa

Any ideas what might be going on? Any and all help is greatly appreciated! This is my flagship farm and I just can't bear the thought of abandoning it.

Some of you may recall my blurb last week about {Beast by Judith Ivory}, which was a Victorian era story set in large part aboard an ocean liner and involved a rather unusual case of hidden identity—essentially the MMC used a storm-induced power outage to interact with the FMC in the dark, so she was not able to see his face.

So imagine my utter shock and delight when I picked up {Beguiling the Beauty by Sherry Thomas} immediately afterward—entirely coincidentally, mind you—only to find myself aboard another Victorian era ocean liner and yet another case of hidden identity! Only this time, the FMC is the one hiding her identity behind a veil (later making the MMC wear a blindfold).

One might think that given the unusual circumstances, with differing authors, and being over a decade apart publication date-wise, that the likelihood of them both being 5-star reads would be pretty low. But, no! They were each stellar, both in their similarities and their differences. Both of them deal with the perception of beauty and I think I found this to be the most compelling aspect of their stories.

In Beast, both main characters are considered unusually beautiful, but Charles' looks have been tainted by a birth defect and a later injury. One of his most endearing traits is actually his vanity about his looks (I know, but iykyk). He's spent his life torn between what he understands to be generally-accepted truth about beauty, and what people have taught him about himself—some are willing to overlook his physical flaws (no doubt enchanted by his personality), some are repulsed by them, and yet others almost seem to fetishize him for them. Louise, on the other hand, is an exemplar of a classical beauty—flawless features, youthful, etc.—but any depth of character in her is completely overlooked by people's focus on her appearance. Charles hides his identity for reasons other than his looks, but what results is a powerfully poignant story about what two people can be, not when they hide their appearances from the other person, but when they feel as though they don't have to think about these things at all.

In Beguiling the Beauty, however, while Christian is certainly handsome, it's Venetia who has been placed on that ivory pedestal. She hides her identity, in part, because her looks have led Christian to judge her unbelievably harshly, having reduced (and misconstrued) her character and actions to being sole products of her aesthetic privilege. Having been long obsessed with her based on looks alone, he uses an evolutionary psychology argument to simultaneously excuse his own superficiality, as well as to condemn Venetia to social criticism. When he later encounters the mysterious veiled woman on the ship, he finds that the faceless woman is, ironically, the only one who has ever been able to make him forget about Venetia.

And while it's the misunderstanding that drives the heart of the plot, I actually found Christian's struggle with his two 'loves'—the faceless woman and the long-standing object of his desire—to be a fascinating and thought-provoking bit of character development. It was a subtle nod (and not ever mentioned explicitly) to this concept of being inexplicably drawn to another person in a way that transcends their obvious qualities. He'd been obsessed with Venetia for over a decade based entirely on looks alone, having never really observed anything about her behavior outside of what could be observed from a careful distance. And on the ship, while there was certainly a physical draw to her form, he had to operate on a kind of trust—that what he was falling in love with was truly about her as a person, and that what her face looked like simply no longer mattered. To find them one in the same is certainly extraordinary (and extraordinarily lucky!), but we are reading fiction here, I suppose.

There were a couple of aspects of Beguiling that I was less fond of, such as the focus on other characters, but truly all of them were made up for by the chemistry and exquisitely agonizing angst between the characters. This is clearly where Thomas shines.

And incidentally, both of these books happened to have the elusive "no epilogue" ending, which I rarely come across and found to be another happy coincidence. I have to wonder, given all the similarities, if Thomas was inspired specifically by Ivory's Beast. I would be curious to know if anyone has found evidence of this elsewhere!

Edit: Upon further research, apparently Sherry Thomas acknowledges Beast by Judith Ivory specifically as the inspiration for this book. Guess this goes to show me that I should always read acknowledgments (but let's be honest, I never do and I probably won't). Either way, the reading of these back-to-back without this knowledge was a happy accident.